As information and the depth of content, along with the number and type of content sources available through the Internet and through public and private databases continues to expand and grow, it becomes increasingly difficult and time-consuming for users to connect and relate information from one content source to another. Although search results from one content source may refer to the same entities or events that occur in, or are accessible from a different content source, using current searching systems and methods, it is left to the user to search through the multiple content sources separately and perform the subsequent work necessary to extract related information about the identified or selected entities (or events) from each content source, and to then relate or link the results together. As the amount of information and content that is available continues to grow and expand, such effort on the part of users to relate retrieved information becomes ever more time-consuming, and is at times, prohibitive in terms of complexity.
Although systems and methods exist which are capable of displaying entities or events that have been extracted from documents or information sources, current systems and methods still fail to provide a way for users to select entities or groups of entities that are related to each other and to then simultaneously update the display or view of the related entities. Moreover, current systems and methods also fail to provide users an efficient means to refine a set of results that are associated with those entities, in order to provide for more detailed and focused search results.
While current information retrieval systems use a facet-based approach to allow users to filter result sets with respect to a pre-defined categorization of the content, these systems are limited by the fact that the facets used typically rely on a characterization of a data set that is specific to one data set. More particularly, the facets used on one data set or content source are not compatible with other data sets or content sources.
Examples of systems using particular facet-base searches, that are likely incompatible with other data sets, are described in, by way of example, U.S. patent application Ser. No. 12/757,227 by Lempel et al., for a System and Method for Selecting Search Results Facets; U.S. patent application Ser. No. 12/261,382 by Guo et al., for a Method and Device for Displaying and Browsing a Multi-Faceted Data Set; and U.S. patent application Ser. No. 12/164,139 by Amitay et al., for Information Retrieval With Unified Search Using Multiple Facets. Each of these systems, methods and devices appear to be limited as described above to particular data sets or content sources as a function of the facets recognized by the system or method.
The current methods and systems described in this application address the need for computer searching and retrieving applications that are capable of relating entities across different content sources and then displaying the search results in an interactive user interface. Moreover, the current inventive methods and systems, provide for the capability such that where selecting one or more of those entities modifies the display of related entities and the display of related content.